Unification: Is Your Network Up To The Challenge?

IT Management recently got the chance to talk with Sanjeev Gupta, director of the Ethernet Switching Business Unit at Nortel Networks. We discussed trends in enterprise networking and network management, especially with regard to infrastructure and new trends like unified communications that will severely affect enterprise networks.

IT Management: What trends are you seeing in the enterprise networking market right now and for the next couple of years?

Sanjeev Gupta: There are two or three trends we are seeing. One is massive migration in the enterprise customer base to VoIP and now to UC (unified communications) — voice with your data, all running over your same infrastructure. A critical component of the drivers for network [infrastructure] refreshes in the enterprise and upgrades [to the network] is the migration to VoIP and UC. The second driver in the market is consolidation — customers have separate networks for video surveillance, for data, for VoIP and more. Companies realize that they can consolidate them to all run on Ethernet and virtualize each network onto the same physical network and get huge opex and capex [operational and capital expenditure] savings. As they, consolidate they are consolidating to fewer devices. They are doing more and more security integration and application intelligence consolidation.IT Management: What are the implications of these changes?

Sanjeev Gupta: One of the critical things that we are seeing in the market is the following: Customers are putting more and more mission-critical data on the infrastructure. In the past, there weren't issues from the reliability standpoint. When it is just data, you don't care so much because the protocols work at making sure it all gets there, but as you add voice and video, there is a huge reliability and quality issue. You can't have delays and latency.

Nortel has taken a serious level of interest in this area. We have the capability to do failover [recovery from failure] in a fraction of a second — orders of magnitude better then our competitors. Others take 3 to 30 seconds. In a voice call, if there are 2 seconds of failure, you hang up on the call. We reset in less than one second. In networks now, latency matters. For example, on Web sites, if it takes 7 seconds or longer to respond, we know that you lose the visitor for good. In large enterprises with mission-critical applications, downtime is measured in millions of dollars. You have to guarantee recovery from failure in fractions of seconds.

We have the most reliable infrastructure for UC — that's one. Second, as you move to an all IP world, security comes to be a primary issue. We have a strong solution: We verify the identity of the user before they connect to the network and make sure the machine is clean before it connects. Within security for Nortel, network access is the main concern. The third concern for how all these things affect enterprise networks is performance. We've gone from a data world to voice. Now you have lots of small packets, and traditionally, [network] performance has not been good for small packets.

So that's what we are addressing, and when you turn on a Nortel-based network, security, reliability and performance are all built in.

IT Management: How about the future? What are the issues going to be in two to three years?

Sanjeev Gupta: The critical thing moving forward is UC. Look at IBM and Microsoft who own almost 100 percent of the desktop. There is a battle brewing over UC for the desktop, and it will be won by Microsoft and IBM. We will be first vendor in the market that implements a router that implements full Microsoft OCS in the router — that's part of our Web optimization — and we have presets optimized for Microsoft applications today. We do a lot to integrate with MS from a data-structure perspective. We also work to integrate IBM applications into our infrastructure and optimize the infrastructure for these applications. The result is that our infrastructure will be the most optimized for Microsoft and IBM UC applications.

IT Management: What do you recommend for organizations thinking about re-architecting — those that are prepared to rebuild their network before they migrate to VoIP, UC and so on?

Sanjeev Gupta: There are a couple of things in the market. If you look at a lot of the old infrastructure, it might not be the best for voice and video for a couple of reasons. It might not be optimized enough, and it can't provide the performance or the reliability for these applications. We recommend looking into a migration road map to UC and VoIP. Take a careful look at the infrastructure [because] you know you will need to keep it for five to seven years. You need to make this investment decision now. Can voice apps run over other people's infrastructure? Of course. But are these the most reliable minimum downtime solutions? Nortel provides those solutions better than others.

IT Management: What future trends do you see that can impact this market and network infrastructure?

Sanjeev Gupta: There are a few things that are happening. One is that, as we look to the future, the next trend in our view is the integration of the back office with infrastructure. You are seeing integration of business applications with voice communications. In Office documents, hover over a person's name [and] communications options pop up. You could start an IM session to discuss the issue. What is not happening is integration of back office with applications. For example, take a hosting service. The time from taking an order for hosting — it can take considerable time before service is up and running because each step is a separate process. Think about productivity, velocity [and] the agile enterprise. There is a lot of work going on today so that we can get to a world where after you enter a sales order into the system, the order entry system communicates to the devices in the network and automatically provisions the network to match the sales order — greatly improved productivity.

IT Management: What would you recommend that organizations think about when building an enterprise road map?

Sanjeev Gupta: You need to have a clear understanding of what expectations you have for the network. Different customers have different expectations of uptime. This is a critical consideration for how reliable my network is and what it provides for my applications. The second area is security and what level of security I'm building into the infrastructure. With the new voice and video applications, now I have IP traffic running all across the network — that opens up new considerations. Then you have all the new options and applications. Things like a branch-office solution, a survivability solution, a redundancy solution. Do I want to go in for Power over Ethernet [PoE] day one or do I want to go through the pain of PoE two years down the road when I do upgrade to VoIP? As I deploy a lot more voice into my branches, is there enough bandwidth? Do I want to put in more bandwidth optimization, and then as I add multimedia, is there enough bandwidth optimization?

It is worth considering — and we are spending a lot of time on it — how we simplify the deployment of these networks. Say we have phones plugging directly into a switch. How automated is this? So we are adding in to existing products. When a phone is plugged into a switch, based on preset policies, it configures the switch properly. We have introduced that capability into our products. We are creating linkages between voice and data and simplifying the linkages. That's part of the message we want to give.

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